by Burke, John
“I don’t want to go on.” Even the subdued murmur of her voice started a powdery rain. “Not into that. Not...not any further.”
“If we go back,” said Mark, “we’ve got van Lynden waiting for us. And if he’s doing guard duty on his own, he’ll be armed.”
“But if we go on, where do we come out?”
“Let’s see.”
The tunnel contracted. The ceiling came down so low that Ellen had to crouch. They found themselves facing a solid wall of rock. To one side there was a shaft tipping down at about forty-five degrees. The beam of the torch splashed along its sides and then picked out a gleam of rail on a lower level.
“A winze,” said Mark. “They could chuck stuff down from here and have it loaded into trucks on that level.”
“And us...?”
“We can slide down,” said Mark decisively.
He demonstrated by shoving his feet into the opening, thrusting his palms against the earth, and then jerking himself forward. He went down in a cloud of dust and grit. At the bottom, he jammed his heels against the nearer rail, and raised his arms towards Ellen.
She let herself slide, and he caught her and kept her on her feet.
They went further into the hillside. Insane, she thought. They were hemmed in, weighed down by hundreds of tons of rock above them, claustrophobically pent within these insecure man-made burrows. She wanted to shout; wanted to run towards the light, wherever it might be.
The tunnel curved and went on curving. Raw edges of rock rasped against her left arm. The miners must have found it impossible to chop a way through the solid rock and had chosen an easier route. Or perhaps the gold seam had followed this wavering arc.
They came into a small cavern, hewn out of the heart of the mountain. The shapes of several openings made dark stains on the perimeter of the cave; but the darkness had a pewter solidity about it, and the openings no longer existed. Mark led Ellen forward until the beam of her torch splayed over one smooth surface. He rapped on it with his knuckles.
“That’s what all those deliveries of lead were in aid of. My God, they must have worked! But what are they sealing off – trying to contain?”
He turned away, his head back, studying the walls and ceiling.
“Look out!” Ellen’s reverberating cry set off a shower of earth and rock splinters.
Mark stood on the brim of another shaft. He stood petrified. When Ellen brought the light closer, he looked down; then whistled incredulously.
The shaft had been lined with lead, a sullen grey tubular coating plunging to a lead plug at the bottom. It appeared to be smeared with earth, perhaps seeping or dropping in from above. But it was a shifting, twinkling soil pattern, seeming to surge up the cylinder as the light played on it.
It was no illusion. The interior of the tube was seething with life.
Ellen nearly dropped the torch.
Mark said: “So there we are. I wonder if this is one of the authorised experimental shafts, or a bit of van Lynden’s private enterprise? Looks like van Lynden territory to me.”
To Ellen it looked like nothing so much as a feverishly bubbling cauldron. Whatever the creatures might be, they were far too tiny to be picked out individually: there must be hundreds of thousands of them, infinitesimal microorganisms frothing into a mass that rose and fell, rose and fell as though being brought to boiling point by some vast gas jet and then allowed to subside again.
Sooner or later they must surely flow over the brim.
“Mansell and his colleagues did their tidy, rigidly controlled drilling,” said Mark, “took their core samples, enclosed their experimental area – and then went away. In moves van Lynden with his saturation technique. And it looks as though even van Lynden got a shock.” He appraised the tunnel closures again.
Ellen felt that they were no more than cardboard, that they would crack or topple over, outwards, to release...what horrors? “This irradiated speed-up of generations” – Mark seemed fascinated, musing as though they had all the time in the world – “must have led to some staggering mutations. If you take a hundred generations of man, you get an awful lot of changes along the line. Same with these bacteria. Van Lynden could have created something different – as different as modern man is from the Neanderthaler. That’s where the trouble started.”
“And it hasn’t finished yet,” said Ellen. “Please can we get out?”
They examined the sealed exits. They all seemed secure, but Mark pointed to gaps around the top and down the sides.
“Not much of a protection,” he observed. “Only a stopgap.”
They came to one narrow panel with wider gaps down the edges. And here again there was movement. The earth was crumbling almost as they watched. It deliquesced into winking, collapsing bubbles of mud.
Mark said: “If they can work as swiftly on solid rock...”
He shook his head in wonderment, then put one foot against the metal panel and shoved hard. It rocked under the pressure. Mark pushed again, and the panel fell back into the tunnel.
The torch showed walls and ceiling as a dripping pulp.
“I can’t go in there,” croaked Ellen.
“It’s clear further along.” Mark seized her wrist again and directed the beam beyond the end of the fallen panel. “Look. Run along the lead and jump for it.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” he said, “and you will.”
“No.” She stood firm.
“Then I’ll go without you,” he said with a grim chuckle.
He sprang on to the panel, thrust down with his left foot, and launched himself forward. His head struck the roof further along. It showered him with dust. But it was ordinary, dry dust.
“Wait for me!”
Ellen scurried and jumped after him, and he was there to catch her.
The tunnel began to slope gently upwards. It narrowed, and Ellen found difficulty in breathing. Suppose this were the path of a seam that had given out? Another corner, and they could find themselves confronted by a rock wall. The way the passage was contracting threatened just that.
A corner. And beyond it, a fork. One shaft went up at a steeper angle. They hesitated. Mark made the decision. He nodded towards the steeper one, and they began to climb.
The dank, stuffy oppression seemed to lift. Ellen thought she could smell something cleaner, fresher. Wishful thinking? But then there was an unmistakable draught. Mark felt it at the same time. Plodding ahead, stooping to avoid rocky overhangs, he slowed and turned to grin at her.
Then there was a smudge of light ahead.
Ellen wanted to break into a run. But Mark edged patiently forward, and stopped a few feet from the exit. The light was diffused by a tangle of bushes and a drooping, exposed tree root. He put his finger to his lips, stooped under the ragged top of the opening, and went down on hands and knees. Ellen hauled herself up beside him.
Through the crisscross of leaves and branches she caught fragmentary glimpses of the far hillside – could almost believe a bright pinpoint of reflection might be Mark’s hired car, still where it had been left – and two of the Bryncroeso Hall chimneys.
Van Lynden spoke.
“Get those two well inside. We don’t want any of it sucked out. One well above Number Two shaft, just to make sure.”
He sounded some distance away, somewhere below them, but his voice was clear. It was followed by a grating sound as though something had been dragged along the ground. Then there was the boom of an indistinguishable voice inside a tunnel. Ellen could almost have believed that it came from behind them, chasing distortedly along the complex of passages.
Over a hundred shafts, trial levels and excavations in the area, Mark had said. The hill must be a veritable honeycomb. She thought of the interlinked tunnels, caves and shafts being gradually – or not so gradually – choked by that multiplying army of ravaging bugs...and wanted to push her way past Mark, out into the good clean air. He had held her back from running down the drive; now h
e held her back while he cautiously tugged branches aside to widen the opening.
“Two days before anyone will dare to venture in there,” they heard van Lynden say. “And then there won’t be much left to help them. No – not so close to the entrance. Over there – there! Look, if you position it...”
The words died away to a subterranean mumble.
“But of course,” said Mark. “Those cylinders. It’s obvious.”
“What?”
“Pesticide. They’re going to wipe out their lovable little pets. After all they’ve done for them!”
“And if we’d stayed in there?”
“Whatever they’re using, it must be something mighty powerful. It wouldn’t have done our catarrh any good.”
He cleared a space for her to wriggle through. Ellen eased past him, edged carefully and quietly sideways, and found herself on a lumpy promontory of rock and sparse grass, looking down into the beautiful, tranquil valley.
Mark squatted beside her. He peered round the tangle of bushes, then pulled back as there was a scrape and a clang from below.
“Your friend David. Rather heavy labour for a chef, I’d say.”
They waited. Ellen thought she heard another burst of voices, but it could have been sounds from across the valley, blurred by a car and then a motor-bike that spluttered and echoed somewhere along an invisible road.
“Killing off the remaining organisms,” said Mark quietly. “Not because they could care less about further subsidence, or the mess they’ve already made. Just because they don’t want anyone else to discover the process or to have specimens to work on. I don’t see how we can stop them.”
Ellen felt, disloyally, that she didn’t want to stop them. She was all in favour of that morass of bacteria being utterly wiped out. She wouldn’t sleep happily if she thought they were breeding and spreading within this hill: her dreams wouldn’t be the kind she cared to dream.
“Right,” said Mark. “I think we could go now.”
“To the road?”
“It must be somewhere down there. Keep bearing left.”
Mark slid his legs over the tufts of grass, and began to jolt down the slope. Ellen followed, springing from one reasonably horizontal hump of ground to another.
It was impossible to go very far left. The ground dissolved into the soggy fringes of the waterfall, and slanting out below was a stepped sequence of rocky spikes forming a craggy, irregular barricade.
Mark stopped. “No use. We’ll have to risk the path. They know the lie of the land, they could probably round us up if we went floundering off over all that.”
They hurried, treading lightly, along the path which sloped along the hillside beneath the adit in which van Lynden and McIntyre were setting up the poison cylinders.
They were about fifty yards past it when there was a yell of discovery.
“Run,” snapped Mark. “For the house. The truck. It’s our only chance.”
Ellen ran. It was what she had been waiting for, longing for – the chance to run, to give way to panic, to dash in some direction, any direction. She stumbled, fell forward against Mark, and felt her weakened ankle turn beneath her. A stone rattled away from the side of her foot and she went down. He heaved her up to her feet.
There was the crack of a gun, and even as she lurched upright she had the impression of a brief flash of light within the tunnel. A bullet whistled past their heads.
“No,” someone was shouting. Van Lynden. “No, you fool...”
The gun fired again. The tunnel mouth amplified the explosion and blasted it out over the valley like the thunder of a cannon.
Then the tunnel appeared to fold in on itself. A haze of dust thickened in the entrance, the edges came together like an open mouth tightening, and through the closing lips there was emitted an almost human belch, an obscene roar that quivered in the air and then died.
“The fool.” Mark was a late, delayed echo. Van Lynden’s last scream – “You fool” – lived a moment longer and then was quenched. “In that confined space – firing a gun inside there!” said Mark, hushed.
They waited, as though expecting the earth to open and yield up McIntyre and van Lynden and David Parr. But there was only a faint, whispering trickle of small stones down the hillside.
Mark put his arm round her and supported her along the path. She skipped, hobbled, found the sharp spasms of pain endurable, and herself forced the pace so that they could get to the silent house more quickly and be away from the place more quickly.
The truck stood where it had stood when they bounced on to it and fled up the hill. The two lead canisters which had been placed near one set of garage doors were gone. Mark propped Ellen solicitously against the corner of the truck and lifted himself up to the level of the tailboard.
He looked into the truck, and let himself drop to the cobbles again.
“Yes. They’ve been loaded, ready for the off.”
“Destination?”
“Wherever they were meant to go, I can tell you where they’re going now. The local police station. Until someone from the Research Centre can come and collect.”
Ellen tried her weight on the wrenched ankle, and winced. She could stand, but only just.
Mark said: “Come on indoors and sit down while I telephone.”
“Can’t we just get out right away?” She had no intention of setting foot in that house again. “Drive to the police station or the nearest phone box, or all the way to that bug factory if you want to. Anywhere, so long as we’re outside those gates. Before they...before...” She gave up.
“As soon as I’ve phoned,” said Mark soothingly. “The boffins ought to be told. If there’s anything they need to bring, they ought to know before they set out.”
He tried to coax her towards the terrace. She stubbornly refused.
“All right,” he conceded. “But you’ve got to take the weight off that foot. Tell you what: sit in the cab until I’ve finished.”
He helped her up into the cab of the truck, and thankfully she stretched her legs out, resting the throbbing left ankle across her right foot.
“Won’t be long.” He laughed – not amused, just reassuring. “Don’t go away.”
“I won’t.”
The seat was hard, with a stiff leathery coating. But it felt marvellous. She slid down a few inches, until a jab from her ankle made her momentarily dizzy. She closed her eyes and at once had a nightmarish vision of three men writhing in a cloud of maggots which had suddenly become a thousand times larger than life-size. The sort of thing you see when you have raw chopped onion and paprika on top of cream cheese, she thought reminiscently. The thought drove the vision away, but still she was glad to open her eyes as the cab door opened on the driver’s side. Mark had been quick.
He switched on the ignition and slammed into gear. And he wasn’t Mark: he was David Parr.
“David, what...”
She was thrown sideways and slashed with pain as the truck skidded, reversed violently, and skidded again as it left the cobbles for the gravel.
“David. You weren’t killed in there.”
She was almost grateful that he at least had survived. But there was no answering gratitude. He was taut, trembling, bitter.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t, was I? I was on my way back to the yard. You didn’t bargain for that, did you? You didn’t get rid of me, you and your tame Nazi.”
“You can’t think it was us. You can’t think we...”
“Hold tight, if you don’t want to get hurt.”
He was not stopping to unfasten the padlock. The truck went straight at the gates. There was a crash and a jolt, Ellen rammed her hands against the dashboard, and the lock gave way and the gates swung protestingly open.
David wheeled the truck round in a tight curve and put his foot down.
She said: “David, stop. Put me down.”
“It’s not a long drive,” he said. “I know the route off by heart.”
“It
’s all over.”
“Done it often enough.”
“Don’t you realise?” she said. “All over.”
“Just because those two got themselves killed up there, you think it’s over? Not with what I’ve got. Not with those two samples in the back. Fetch a high price, believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Ellen, “but it’s nothing to do with me. I’m no part of it. Let me get off.”
“Why?”
“I’m no part of it.” She tried to din it into him. “I’m no good to you.”
His odd, twisted smile softened and became almost wistful. It was somehow more frightening than the most vindictive enmity could have been. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that. Don’t be too hasty, Ellen. Plenty of time to think about it. Don’t be too hasty.”
They covered another five lurching, sickening miles, and then David said thoughtfully: “Pity we couldn’t have met earlier. In happier circumstances.”
So soon, she thought: so soon after Fiona? He was sad, sick, incurable.
They racketed through a grey village. There was no sign hanging from the bracket outside the pub, and the church clock had stopped. Ellen gathered all this in as they passed, and knew that if she started to laugh she would be unable to stop.
“I knew when we first met,” said David, “that we stood a better chance than most. It can be done, you know. It can still be done.”
What could she say to him? You’re not serious, I’m not interested, I’m not really with you even though I’m here in the cab, you’re not well, you’ve got to stop, stop...stop …
She said: “What about Fiona?”
“What about her?”
“There’s only ever been one woman for you.”
“Fiona’s gone.” His eyes were steadfastly on the road ahead.
Her stomach turned. He couldn’t be so callous unless he were utterly deranged.
Did he really think you could write someone off the way you’d write off a bad investment and turn your attention coolly towards a better proposition?